Torture's out. Now they call it abuse

"Prevail" is the "in" word in America just now. We are not going to "win" in Iraq - because we did that in 2003, didn't we, when we stormed up to Baghdad and toppled Saddam? Then George Bush declared "Mission Accomplished". So now we must "prevail". That’s what F J "Bing" West, ex-soldier and former assistant secretary for International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration said this week. Plugging his new book - No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah - he gave a frightening outline of what lies in store for the Sunni Muslims of Iraq.

I was sitting a few feet from Bing - plugging my own book - as he explained to the great and the good of New York how General Casey was imposing curfews on the Sunni cities of Iraq, one after the other, how if the Sunnis did not accept democracy they would be "occupied" (he used that word) by Iraqi troops until they did accept democracy. He talked about the "valour" of American troops - there was no word of Iraq’s monstrous suffering - and insisted that America must "prevail" because a "Jihadist" victory was unthinkable. I applied the Duke of Wellington’s Waterloo remark about his soldiers to Bing. I don’t know if he frightened the enemy, I told the audience, but by God Bing frightened me.

Our appearance at the Council on Foreign Relations - housed in a 58th Street townhouse of deep sofas and fearfully strong air conditioning (it was early November for God’s sake) - was part of a series entitled "Iraq: The Way Forward". Forward, I asked myself? Iraq is a catastrophe. Bing might believe he was going to "prevail" over his "Jihadists" but all I could say was that the American project in Iraq was over, that it was a colossal tragedy for the Iraqis dying in Baghdad alone at the rate of 1,000 a month, that the Americans must leave if peace was to be restored and that the sooner they left the better.